Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval Books

A fascinating and authoritative collection of essays examining the varied adaptations of and responses to Chaucer's work.The Geoffrey Chaucer of this book is not the Father of English Literature that you think you know. In this wide-ranging collection of...

A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artistsBetween the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination - poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and...

George Kennedy's three volumes on classical rhetoric have long been regarded as authoritative treatments of the subject. This new volume, an extensive revision and abridgment of The Art of Persuasion in Greece, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, and...

The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and cultureAn unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the...

This beautiful collection brings together passages from the renowned stories, poems, dramas and myths of South Asian literature, including the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Drawing on the translations published by the Clay Sanskrit Library, the book...

This lively retelling of the myth of the voyage of St Brendan from Ireland to America is illustrated with original linocuts by American artist Kathleen Neeley. Jackson's third poetry collection is an engaging and spirited interpretation of the tale,...

The heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of...

This book investigates the troubled relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. Acknowledging that the medieval and medievalism are mutually constitutive, and that their texts can be read using similar strategies, it argues that medieval...

This unique and exciting collection, inspired by the scholarship of literary critic Stephanie Trigg, offers cutting-edge responses to the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer for the current critical moment. The chapters are linked by the organic and naturally...

The Logic of Love in the Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer's magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an "insoluble." Philosophers of the fourteenth century expended great...

Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called 'green' terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world,...

Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome's first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known...

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine's ConfessionsIn this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions-what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read,...

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers - from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie...

Aristotle's Poetics is the most important book ever written for writers and readers of stories-whether novels, short fiction, plays, screenplays, or nonfiction. Aristotle was the first to identify the keys to plot, character, audience perception, tragic...

How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only...

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn't absent from-but rather was at the heart of-Roman religionBelief and Cult argues that belief isn't uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion...

Timeless techniques of effective public speaking from ancient Rome's greatest oratorAll of us are faced countless times with the challenge of persuading others, whether we're trying to win a trivial argument with a friend or convince our coworkers about...

A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of...

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine Comedy. For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work...

Celebrated for its own clarity and sublime style, this classic work of literary theory draws on the writings of Demosthenes, Plato, Sappho, Thucydides, Euripides, and Aeschylus, among others, to examine and delineate the essentials of a noble style. The...

Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating...

Successfully integrating elegance and a close fidelity to the Greek, these new translations aim to provide Greekless students with as close a sense as possible of how the Greeks themselves thought and wrote about the world. Miller's skillful introduction...